Old Fort Snelling, 1819-1858

by Marcus Lee Hansen

For some years it had been customary for the British authorities to send presents to the Indians on the Mississippi, and Robert Dickson had promised the natives that the practice would be continued. But with the coming of peace this custom was not allowed by the Americans. Accordingly, in June, 1815, word was sent to the river tribes, that all who came to the British headquarters at Drummond Island in Lake Huron, would be supplied. By June 19th of the next year four hundred Indians had arrived at the post—mainly Sioux. To sympathetic ears they reported that they feared that the Americans were planning their extinction, and a confederation was being formed to resist the building of American forts on the Indian lands. As late as 1825, of the four thousand Indians in the habit of visiting Drummond Island, three thousand came from the region west and southwest of Lake Huron—that is from American territory.[37] These motley processions which trailed through the American woods, stopping to beg at the American posts, were not slow in being reported. It did not take a vivid imagination to see that the renewal of border warfare was inevitable.[38]

This danger was increased by the rapid development of the West following the war. Just as over the mountain trails and down the rivers, Kentucky and Tennessee had been settled before the war, now the States of the Old Northwest received their pioneers. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who made his first trip down the Ohio at this time (1818), remarked: “I mingled in this crowd, and, while listening to the anticipations indulged in, it seemed to me that the war had not, in reality, been fought for ‘free trade and sailors' rights’ where it had commenced, but to gain a knowledge of the world beyond the Alleghanies.… To judge by the tone of general conversation, they meant, in their generation, to plow the Mississippi Valley from its head to its foot.”[39]

The flatboats on the rivers, the crowded ferries, and the caravans crossing the prairies were familiar scenes. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which appeared in 1819, Washington Irving puts this fondest dream into the mind of his hero, Ichabod: “Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where.” When he wrote this the author was not using his imagination: it was a picture he saw daily.[40]

The extent of this westward movement is indicated by the provisions made for the political organization of these growing settlements. Indiana achieved statehood in 1816 and Illinois in 1818. Across the river in Missouri the population had grown from 20,000 in 1810 to 66,000 in 1820,[41] and the weighty questions concerning her admission were being discussed in Washington.

With an expanding frontier brought into contact with hostile Indians, trouble was bound to result. Various plans were proposed to deal with the problem. It was reported that General Jackson would take charge of active military operations against the Indians of the upper Mississippi.[42] One agent suggested that “three or four months' full feeding on meat and bread, even without ardent spirit, will bring on disease, and, in six or eight months, great mortality.… I believe more Indians might be killed with the expense of $100,000 in this way, than $1,000,000 expended in the support of armies to go against them.”[43]

Fortunately, wiser counsels than either of these prevailed to control the Indians: the control of the fur trade was necessary. It was felt, and rightly, that much of the trouble in the West was due to the power of the British traders. Accordingly, by an act of Congress of April 29, 1816, it was provided that “licenses to trade with the Indians within the territorial limits of the United States shall not be granted to any but citizens of the United States, unless by the express direction of the President of the United States, and upon such terms and conditions as the public interest may, in his opinion, require.” To carry this act into effect the president was authorized to call upon the military force.[44]

This legislation was most opportune, since by the commercial convention of October 20, 1818, the northern boundary was definitely agreed upon as the forty-ninth parallel westward from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains.[45] Ever since the negotiators of the Treaty of Paris of 1783 had inserted a geographical impossibility by declaring that the boundary should extend due west from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, there had existed a vagueness as to where the actual line should be drawn.[46] In 1806 the British traders thought it would be run from the lake to the source of the river;[47] and as late as 1818 Benjamin O'Fallon wrote from Prairie du Chien that Robert Dickson “is directed to build a fort on the highest land between Lac du Travers and Red river, which he supposes will be the established line between the two countries.”[48] But with the boundary now defined, the area where the trade laws were to be enforced was evident.

The method of Indian trade by foreigners was to be supplanted by an extension of the United States trading house system. This was a group of trading houses, conducted by the government, where the Indians could exchange their furs for goods at cost price and thus avoid both the deceit and whiskey of the private merchant, although they were often willing to submit to the one for the sake of the other.[49] As early as 1805 Pike had promised the Indians, in council assembled, that the government intended to build a trading house at the mouth of the Minnesota River.[50] The commissioners at Portage des Sioux, in 1815, had been instructed to inform the tribes that “it is intended to establish strong posts very high up the Mississippi, and from the Mississippi to Lake Michigan, and to open trading-houses at those posts, or other suitable places for their accommodation.”[51] In 1818 T. L. McKenny, Superintendent of Indian Trade, recommended the building of seven additional trading houses, one of which was to be located on the “River St. Peters, at or about its junction with the Mississippi.”[52]

Thus, through the Indian department steps were being taken to inaugurate a new régime in the upper Northwest. But Indian agents and trading houses needed the protection and administrative arm of the military department in order to be effective. The forward movement of the military frontier during the years succeeding the war is significant as marking a trend towards the Americanization of a great region.